Forestry and Climate Change

Forestry and Climate Change

In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.

– International Panel on Climate Change

Did you know that managing our forests to make forest products is one the best ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere?

It’s true – trees are made mostly out of carbon. As trees grow they suck up carbon dioxide. Through a complicated process known as photosynthesis, trees take carbon dioxide and convert it – pushing out oxygen for us to breathe, and keeping the carbon for growth. Over 50% of trees are made up of carbon.
When trees are turned into wood products like lumber, furniture, and musical instruments, they lock up this carbon. In the forest where the trees were removed, new trees take root, grow and take additional carbon out of the atmosphere. Managing our forests to ensure they are healthy, meet the needs of communities and that they give us the products we need, are all part of sustainable forest management.

Helping to fight climate change requires us to look at ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere. Managing our forests in a sustainable way achieves this. By growing healthy forests to be turned into wood products for construction, furniture or books, we are taking carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it up.

The potential of forestry and forest products to help fight climate change is so important that the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change has recognized that sustainable forest management, combined with the use of wood products, is one of the best things we can do to remove carbon from the atmosphere. It takes a forest to help fight climate change. Check out what the Government of Canada has to say.

#ItTakesAForest

“It Takes a Forest” is an initiative led by Forests Ontario in partnership with local, like-minded individuals and organizations with a common goal of providing the public with unbiased, fact-based information on Ontario’s forest sector and the role of our forests as one of the province’s most sustainable resources.